It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong. Know-it-alls in the school system do not lose one dime or one hour's sleep if their bright ideas turn out to be all wrong, or even disastrous, for the child.

Jewish World Review; "Wake up, Parents"; 18 August 2000.

People who think that they are being "exploited" should ask themselves whether they would be missed if they left, or whether people would say: "Good riddance"?

Random thoughts, 29 April 2002.

What the welfare system and other kinds of governmental programs are doing is paying people to fail. In so far as they fail, they receive the money; in so far as they succeed, even to a moderate extent, the money is taken away.

During a discussion in Milton Friedman's "Free to Choose" television series in 1980.

Racism has never done this country any good, and it needs to be fought against, not put under new management for different groups.

Before the Iraq war I was quite disturbed by some of the neoconservatives, who were saying things like, "What is the point of being a superpower if you can't do such-and-such, take on these responsibilities?" The point of being a superpower is that people will leave you alone.

Nothing could be more jolting and discordant with the vision of today's intellectuals than the fact that it was businessmen, devout religious leaders and Western imperialists who together destroyed slavery around the world. And if it doesn't fit their vision, it is the same to them as if it never happened.

If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 50 years ago, a liberal 25 years ago and a racist today.

When I see the worsening degeneracy in our politicians, our media, our educators, and our intelligentsia, I can’t help wondering if the day may yet come when the only thing that can save this country is a military coup.

Too often what are called "educated" people are simply people who have been sheltered from reality for years in ivy-covered buildings. Those whose whole careers have been spent in ivy-covered buildings, insulated by tenure, can remain adolescents on into their golden retirement years.

Virtually no idea is too ridiculous to be accepted, even by very intelligent and highly educated people, if it provides a way for them to feel special and important. Some confuse that feeling with idealism.

It may be expecting too much to expect most intellectuals to have common sense, when their whole life is based on their being uncommon -- that is, saying things that are different from what everyone else is saying. There is only so much genuine originality in anyone. After that, being uncommon means indulging in pointless eccentricities or clever attempts to mock or shock.

Ever Wonder Why? and Other Controversial Essays, 2006. p. 328

One of the painful signs of years of dumbed-down education is how many people are unable to make a coherent argument. They can vent their emotions, question other people's motives, make bold assertions, repeat slogans-- anything except reason.

As far as party primaries are concerned, both Republican and Democratic Party primaries are dominated by the most zealous voters, whose views may not reflect the views of most members of their own respective parties, much less the views of those who are going to vote in the November general election.
In recent times, each election year has seen each party's nominee selected - or at least subject to veto - by its most extreme wing and then forced to try to move back to the center before the general election.
This can only undermine the public's confidence in the integrity of the candidates of both parties.

Republicans won big, running as Republicans, in 2004. But once they took control of Congress, they started acting like Democrats and lost big. There is a lesson in that somewhere but whether Republicans will learn it is another story entirely.

When we hear about rent control or gun control, we may think about rent or guns but the word that really matters is 'control.' That is what the political left is all about, as you can see by the incessant creation of new restrictions in places where they are strongly entrenched in power, such as San Francisco or New York.

To find anything comparable to crowds' euphoric reactions to Obama, you would have to go back to old newsreels of German crowds in the 1930s, with their adulation of their fuehrer, Adolf Hitler. With hindsight, we can look back on those people with pity, knowing now how many of them would be led to their deaths by the man they idolized.

“Anyone who has actually had to take responsibility for consequences by running any kind of enterprise — whether economic or academic, or even just managing a sports team — is likely at some point to be chastened by either the setbacks brought on by his own mistakes or by seeing his successes followed by negative consequences that he never anticipated.”

"Both history and contemporary data show that countries prosper more when there are stable and dependable rules, under which people can make investments without having to fear unpredictable new government interventions before these investments can pay off."

It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medication somehow think that we can afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, medication and a government bureaucracy to administer it. (chapter: "What society expends?").

Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric." (chapter: "Political Trade-Offs").

A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles (1987)[edit]

Facts do not "speak for themselves." They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theory or visions are mere isolated curiosities.

Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good. In area after area - crime, education, housing, race relations - the situation has gotten worse after the bright new theories were put into operation. The amazing thing is that this history of failure and disaster has neither discouraged the social engineers nor discredited them.

Barbarians inside the Gates and Other Controversial Essays (1999)[edit]

When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.

I have never understood why it is "greed" to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else's money.

People who pride themselves on their "complexity" and deride others for being "simplistic" should realize that the truth is often not very complicated. What gets complex is evading the truth.

Those who believe that "basic necessities" should belong to people as a matter of right ignore the implication -- that people are to work only for amenities, frivolities, and ego. Will that mean more work or less work? And if less, where are all those "basic necessities" coming from that the government is supposed to hand out?

Many of the dangerous things that drivers do are not likely to save them even 10 seconds. When you bet your life against 10 seconds, that is giving bigger odds than you are ever likely to get in Las Vegas.

Most problems do not get solved. They get superceded by other concerns.

People who talk incessantly about "change" are often dogmatically set in their ways. They want to change other people.

Maturity is not a matter of age. You have matured when you are no longer concerned with showing how clever you are, and give your full attention to getting the job done right. Many never reach that stage, no matter how old they get.

One of the most ridiculous defenses of foreign aid is that it is a very small part of our national income. If the average American set fire to a five-dollar bill, it would be an even smaller percentage of his annual income. But everyone would consider him foolish for doing it.

Letters from teachers continue to confirm the incompetence which they deny. A teacher in Montana says that my criticisms of teachers are "nieve." No, that wasn't a typographical error. He spelled it that way twice.

If I could offer one piece of advice to young people thinking about their future, it would be this: Don't preconceive. Find out what the opportunities are.

Some of the people on death row today might not be there if the courts had not been so lenient on them when they were first offenders.

If you don't believe in the innate unreasonableness of human beings, just try raising children.

Time was when people used to brag about how old they were -- and I am old enough to remember it.

In the summer of 1959, I worked as a clerk-typist in the headquarters of the U.S. Public Health Service in Washington. The people I worked for were very nice and I grew to like them. One day, a man had a heart attack at around 5 PM, on the sidewalk outside the Public Health Service. He was taken inside to the nurse's room, where he was asked if he was a government employee. If he were, he would have been eligible to be taken to a medical facility there. Unfortunately, he was not, so a phone call was made to a local hospital to send an ambulance. By the time this ambulance made its way through miles of Washington rush-hour traffic, the man was dead. He died waiting for a doctor, in a building full of doctors. Nothing so dramatized for me the nature of a bureaucracy and its emphasis on procedures, rather than results.

Some intellectuals’ downplaying of objective reality and enduring criteria extends beyond social, scientific, or economic phenomena into art, music, and philosophy. The one over-riding consistency across all these disparate venues is the self-exaltation of the intellectuals. Unlike great cultural achievements of the past, such as magnificent cathedrals, which were intended to inspire kings and peasants alike, the hallmark of self-consciously “modern” art and music is its inaccessibility to the masses and often even its deliberate offensiveness to, or mockery of, the masses.
Just as a physical body can continue to live, despite containing a certain amount of microorganisms whose prevalence would destroy it, so a society can survive a certain amount of forces of disintegration within it. But that is very different from saying that there is no limit to the amount, audacity and ferocity of those disintegrative forces which a society can survive, without at least the will to resist.

The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work. Therefore we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive.

I must take the occasion to apologize for a major omission from my article, my failure to give credit to Professor Thomas Sowell for two excellent discussions on Marxian economics which I have only recently come across. While he does not deal explicitly with the transformation problem, his discussion of Marxian value theory, which is documented with exquisite care, comes to conclusions very similar to my own on the tautological nature of the value theory and on the nature of Marx' interests in the subject. Though he does sometimes speak of value theory as a first approximation [3,1967, p. 66] he makes it clear that Marx always considered the deviations between prices and values to be systematic [3, 1967, pp. 65-6]. I recommend these pieces unhesitatingly as models of Marxian scholarship.

Sowell’s book attacks liberal, experts and intellectuals for their interventions into the media sphere (the wealth of homosexual journalists explains the absence of ‘factual information’ that could reflect negatively on homosexuals), the law, war (pacifism fails to understand the ‘tragic vision’ that human aggression must be controlled by force) and finally for seeking to replace ‘family, religion and patriotism’ with ‘class’ and ‘“gender”’. Ultimately, this partisan book reproduces the Hobbesian vision of humanity as savage and selfish and lacking higher instincts. There is no society: we are all rational consumers whose only influence should be through our myriad daily economic transactions. Intellectual utopianism is tyrannical arrogance. Democracy leads to fascism, and intellectuals are already there. Intellectuals and Society is neither philosophy, nor politics. It is, however, an instructive tour d’horizon of Tea Party concerns.

Sowell is an economist by training and should not be expected to know much about American foreign policy, as it’s beyond his area of expertise. I do find it a little rich, however, that Sowell has written a book complaining about what happens when intellectuals leave their knowledge reservation to opine about events of the day — and then proceeds to commit that precise sin during his book promotion.
There are two possibilities here. Either Sowell has no capacity for irony, or he’s cleverly trying to add data points to support his argument.

If there was any justice in the intellectual world, Thomas Sowell would be awarded the Nobel Prize for his brilliant interdisciplinary studies on the connections between race, culture and economics around the globe.

Thomas Sowell is a gifted applied economist with much of importance to say about the larger issues in social policy and government regulation of economic affairs. [...] Sowell, however, has two failings. First, he has no heart for the plight of the poor, so his work in this area is illuminating for the false ideas he debunks, but does not contribute in any way to dealing with the problem of poverty. Second, he is a thorough-going right-wing ideologue, who is often cogent in his critique of liberal ideas, but is blind to similar, indeed often parallel, problems with conservative ideas. This book suffers especially from the second of these weaknesses. [...]Sowell has no understanding of information economics. He follows Hayek on the distributed nature of information, but he never confronts the literature that deals with the transformation of private information into public information. The importance of public information, central for instance to Durkheim and Aumann, is completely ignored in his treatment of government regulation.

For many years the term Austrian school in the United States was synonymous with Mises’s disciples. The first outstanding pupils to find themselves highly respected were Murray N. Rothbard and Israel M. Kirzner. In the 1970s and 1980s the group greatly expanded, with the present most representative work probably being done by Thomas Sowell.

Friedrich Hayek, unfinished essay for the New Palgrave dictionary of economics, published in addendum of Chapter 1 of The fortunes of liberalism: essays on Austrian economics and the ideal of freedom (2012).

Professor Sowell is one of the rare minds who, after they have ascended from the infinite variety of concrete facts to a general view accounting for the structure of the complex world, find their way back to the wealth of particulars from which they started and in which ordinary people, other than economic theorists, are alone interested. Although his exposition of economic theory is impeccable and contains many original contributions, the strength of the book, its impressiveness and liveliness, is due to his always having before his eyes the concrete phenomena. Simple and vivid illustrations make us aware of the practical implications of his theoretical insights. [...] What I mean by the heading I have given to this review is that if I should now be asked by persons capable of exact thinking but ignorant of technical economics (and there must be hundreds of thousands of them who have great influence on policy) what single modern work would give them the best introduction to the present knowledge needed to judge the wisdom or folly of current policies, I would without hesitation refer them to Professor Sowell’s book.

Friedrich Hayek, in "The Best Book on General Economics in Many a Year, Knowledge and Decision By Thomas Sowell: Reviewed by F. A. Hayek" Reason, Vol. 13, No. 8 (December 1981).

All in all, Sowell offers a number of intriguing ideas in the book, but he leaves too many of them only partly developed and defended. One final example: Sowell claims that those of us who favor free markets are more empirically inclined and have less ego invested in our views than those who advocate central planning and heavy government intervention generally. That is my impression too, and it is one of the most interesting and important ideas in his book. Unfortunately, he gives no evidence for that comparison. The book would have been a great forum in which to do so, but on this idea and too many others, he leaves his readers unsatisfied.

David Henderson, Review of Intellectuals and Society by Thomas Sowell, Regulation (2010)

Sowell likes history, but he likes it on Post-it notes. He also prefers to revisit stale arguments rather than intervene in current controversies. In a book about intellectuals and society, he manages to ignore the health-care and financial crises. Instead, he argues that intellectuals have misunderstood Herbert Hoover. Wouldn't VLII help us with the current economic crisis, to find out which ideas "worked"?

Russell Jacoby, "Why Intellectuals Are All Bad", The Chronicle of Higher Education (2010)

Instead of addressing any concrete issues, Mr. Sowell simply repeats the bluster that intellectuals play rhetorical tricks and avoid arguments. As usual, he provides no details. If teaching consists of repetition, Mr. Sowell is a master. As to the single specific point in Sowell's note—that he in fact offers criticism of contemporary intellectuals, for instance, of myself: Dream on. Sowell cites me in two sentences—that is all—and he cites me in error. In Sowell country, a passing mention or mismention constitutes criticism.

I have a very high likelihood of finding amusement in the things that Thomas Sowell says. It's not what he says so much as the fact that he's saying it. ... Thomas Sowell is very well known for his critique of intellectuals who make claims about society. That's all well and good - he even has some good points in the critique. But I just can't bring myself to take Sowell completely seriously when he puts on his public intellectual hat, precisely because he is so widely identified as an anti-public-intellectual. ... A lot of this is just meant to be in fun - the point of Intellectuals and Society was a good point. Unfortunately, it's often people who complain the loudest about the misbehavior of others that are successful in taking the spotlight off themselves.

Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions is, on the whole, a very stimulating book and it argues a very important point, namely, that the political struggles which will shape our future social and political order are not only, and maybe not even primarily, driven by identifiable interests and by rent-seeking activ - ities that use politics as a pure machinery for the redistribution of material wealth. Sowell rightly reminds us of the genuine power of ideas and visions in the political arena.